Remember to breathe

I used to write a column when I worked in a business school that was called “Remember to Breathe”. Every Friday when the paper came out it was a lot of fun to walk around the school and see people reading my column and smiling. I think they smiled as I wrote about my personal life much as I do here. This was unusual in a business school weekly particularly when I wrote about love, anger and pain, which I still write about. Some things are a constant in the world and these emotions will always be with us. I hope they will always be with us as imagine what life would be like if they were not. I don’t have a lot of faith in people who do not experience these emotions as they seem almost lobotomized. The portion of their limbic system which deals with emotion has withered and died. Functioning is never a problem but reaching a high and dipping down into a low certainly is. Lately I have been recognizing how many of us share this emotional dipping yet fear having others discover this trait. Shame is common among us emotional dippers as we view others in the world as being separate from us.

I am working on a small solution for those of us who would like more comfort in life. Some years back I thought about communal living and couldn’t work out what felt right to me. Recently I have conceived of the perfect village for cozy living with compatible people. I think it would work really well to find a group of people, all ages, all ethnicities, and buy some land. Each family or single person could have a small house and there would be a large common space for gathering together. One could either chose to eat alone or with other friends in the common space. There would be shared facilities and a feeling of community. wouldn’t this be a great way to live?